Keenaghan Collaborative is the first Irish business to be an accredited and licensed Flow Consultant with Entrepreneurs Institute, a leading entrepreneur education group founded by Social Entrepreneur & Futurist, Roger James Hamilton. Keenaghan Collaborative now offers Talent Dynamics and Wealth Dynamics profiling assessments and consultancy to individuals and teams. Benefits include:

when you find your flow you reclaim your time to focus on what you love most and do best.

when you understand your natural path you know what advice to follow, what to ignore and what to seek out.

you can grow a high performing team when you understand your profile, the team profile and the type of people that you need to have on your team.

when you understand how flow is created through creating value and leverage in your natural way, you impact growth of revenues and profit.

when you learn to leverage your own value more effectively you can make a much greater difference in the world.

When we think of planning it is generally in relation to an event or a project. There are numerous tools out there that can help design a good plan and most will direct you to steps, lists, tasks etc that you need to take to get from A to B. Often the challenge is finding a way of planning that works for you, your team or your company.

On Saturday, June 9th, Celia Keenaghan, PhD expertly guided this unique workshop in a relaxed, productive and confidential space.

Celia shared experience and tools that helped participants move from ideas to action with a plan suited to their personality, situation, and life.

“Celia brings a calm wisdom to everything she does”

“she is focused, practical and helpful”

At this workshop participants learned by doing and left with work done.

Workplace stress, low morale, reduction in sales and unmet targets can often be rooted in poor communication and untapped creativity. Bullying, relationship difficulties and anxiety often stem from an inability to see things from a different perspective.

Reflection, communication and collaboration are essential skills in today’s workplace, schools, colleges, family and all relationships. Creativity in business is important as it involves the ability to come up with new and different viewpoints on a subject.

Sligo based entrepreneur, Dr. Celia Keenaghan has a wealth of experience in helping people work better together. Drawing on this experience together with her love of the landscape of the North West she has created a simple but highly effective tool that improves team communications and activates people’s creativity. The first in the KeenCards series, Working Better Together is a pack of 32 individual cards. On one side is a photo of the landscape and on the other is a carefully chosen word. The photo/word combination derive from uniting a sociological understanding of how people work together with what we can learn from nature where all elements have to work together to thrive.

Dr Keenaghan successfully launched KeenCards through Kickstarter.com – a funding website for creative projects. KeenCards is hosted by Keenaghan Collaborative a well established consultancy business based in the Innovation Centre at the Institute of Technology, Sligo. For further information contact celia@keenaghan.ie.

What is Social Innovation?

‘It is a novel solution to a social problem, that is more effective, efficient, sustainable or just that presents solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.’ (Centre for Social Innovation, Stanford Graduate School of Business).

The primary goal is to create social change. It is driven by an extra motive that has shared value, at once economic and social. It can take place in public, private and community sector organisations but the most successful ideas take place in collaboration across these sectors. Key characteristics include knowledge sharing, co-creation, evidence based approaches and citizen engagement. It engages multidisciplinary, tailored and participative empowering approach instead of ‘top down’ approach.

Social Innovation is getting increased attention globally. For example, the EU leading strategy Europe 2020 (aiming for a ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive economy’), sees social innovation as an avenue that can provide ‘new, more efficient answers to meet growing social needs’. The six major social trends identified at EU level that represent huge challenges also provide opportunities for social innovation including trends in: migration and ageing, environment, new communities, poverty, health and well-being and ethical goods and services.

To implement Social Innovation in any of these areas we need to consider:

Knowledge exchange

Action planning

Creation of multi-stakeholder platforms

Cross-sectoral collaboration

Development of incubation targeted at Social innovation

Training in areas such as critical thinking and creative solutions

The concept of change-maker is one that has emerged alongside social innovation thinking. As change makers we need to look at situations from multiple angles in order to find solutions. We need to identify and critically appraise our skills and abilities to become successful change makers. Perseverance, self-confidence, communication, leadership, internal focus of control, empathy, critical thinking have been identified as key attributes. This skill set is central to the conscious and systemic approaches needed for building innovation capacity, where creation of new solutions is done with people, not for them.

The sustainability of any business depends on the society the business is placed in. If we understand the challenges of the society and put improvement of human well being as one of the core values of the business, the path the business takes should always meet the demands of the market while building good reputation, creating trust and being seen as beneficial to the society among potential clients, employees and society as whole.

A note on Terminology:

Social Entrepreneurship – behaviours and attitudes of individuals involved in creating new ventures for social purposes.

Social Enterprises – enterprises for which the social or societal objectives of the common good is the reason for the commercial activity. Profits are mainly reinvested with a view to achieving this social objective. Social enterprises can take numerous forms

‘It is a novel solution to a social problem, that is more effective, efficient, sustainable or just that presents solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.’ (Centre for Social Innovation, Stanford Graduate School of Business). Social innovation can take place in public, private and community/voluntary sector organisations. Often the most fruitful sources of new ideas take place in collaborations across sectors.